The server-side application environment provides a standard, easy to use
framework for developing Grid services, with mechanisms for PKI-based
authentication, authorization based on access control lists in the context of
distributed virtual organizations.
Services are automatically published for discovery using a global service
registry, and can be used from a variety of clients, including web browsers, scripts
and full-scale applications.

Grid Computing

A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that
provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to
high-end computational capabilities.
Kesselman, Foster, The Grid: Blueprint for a new Computing
Infrastructure, 1998. As quoted by Foster,
2002.

A more detailed description of individual services and interfaces can be
found here.

Client server communication

Communication between the client and server is conducted via the
lightweight
XML-RPC remote precedure call
mechanism, JSON-RPC, and SOAP (only in JClarens). All serialization formats are supported by the same
server.

Clients/Demos

A browser-based Javascript/Java-applet client can be seen here.
Most US Grid CAs are supported by this demo installation.
See the screenshots page for a look at
the Root client.

The Clarens server and Root clients was used by two different groups for
demonstrating remote analysis of Physics data at the Supercomputing 2002 conference.

The above demo was repeated for Supercomputing 2003, but with a focus
on disk-to-disk file transfer as part of the bandwidth challenge. A transfer
rate of 400MB/s using two Clarens servers and two clients was achieved.

High Performance

On a desktop 2.6 GHz P4 running the Fedora Core OS, call latency, including
fine grained access control, is 1.4 ms (around 700 calls/s).
On a dual Xeon 3.0 GHz over a LAN performance is around 1450 calls/s.
Moreover, this performance is mainatained at a constant level for large
numbers of users (tested for up to 70 simultaneous users).

SourceForge Project

CVS/monotone

We are transitioning to using the monotone distributed version
control system to store Clarens source code. The main repository can be
browsed here.
The repository currently contains the Apache web server code, the web
interface, the Clarens web pages, as well as the (in-progress) standalone
Clarens server.
The SourceForge CVS pages can still be browsed at
CVS.